Regaining Trust

When trying to regain your partner’s trust, it’s understandable to have a sense of urgency. Whether you are trying to prevent your partner from leaving, or feel terrible about the pain that your partner is experiencing, you likely feel anxious to rebuild your relationship and your life. Thus, having your partner express anger, distrust and sadness is very uncomfortable for you. However, quickly skipping through these emotions may not allow your partner to adequately heal, and may encourage hanging onto the past in the long run.

Coming clean about secrets that you’ve kept is an early and important step towards letting go of controlling perceptions about you that are purely built on a facade. To help your relationship heal, you have to continue to allow your partner walk through emotions. It’s unpleasant that someone who you care about is feeling this level of pain. It’s also natural that you want the pain to stop for your partner, but that’s not how emotional healing works. True healing takes time, and time is what is out of your control.

Therefore, pushing your partner to heal, when your partner isn’t ready, is going to come across as if you’re only focused on yourself. People can only heal themselves emotionally. They can’t be healed by someone else. Thus, with repeated betrayals, your partner is going to think that you are simply creating another illusion. Personal changes don’t tend to happen quickly, and your partner is going to be suspicious of your intentions. So rather than focus on your partner’s mood and behavior, it’s best to change the one thing that you can. Focus on identifying the problems in your life, controlling your behavior, and making true, long-term change. Your relationship will likely follow suit with your effort for true change as a result.